Current 4th year BigLaw Associate and have my first interview for an in house position this week. I haven’t interviewed since law school. Any tips or advice appreciated!

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Highlight your relevant skills, but culture/personality fit is just as important. Note that outside of certain highly competitive roles like FAANG, most companies don’t care about biglaw experience and you are competing against people from mid and small law who will be willing to move for much less money.

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Your answers should be oriented towards highlighting how you can help the business move forward while minimizing risk to the company. Don't talk about how you researched the hell out of an issue. Talk about how you were able to quickly help a client accomplish a business goal while protecting them.

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Demonstrate that you know the job is:
To make the “complex” be “simple”, and provide quick accurate guidance.
No legal treatises, just mitigating risk to acceptable levels.
You also need to be flexible, and tailor your approach based on the audience.

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Dont be weird

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Honestly just be able to explain your experience why youre interested in the company and be friendly. And again, dont be weird

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F

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I am not an AI blind supporter but I found mocks with chat-gpt/gemini INCREDIBLY helpful and I literally practiced every single question I received during the actual interviews. It’ll critique your answers and help reframe. It feels awkward but I don’t think I would’ve gotten my role without this exercise.

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This is what I planned to suggest.

You can upload a redacted version of your resume with the job description. AI will provide likely questions, skills to highlight, topics to downgrade, etc.

Also, as the previous poster stated you can also run mock (oral) interviews with real time feedback.

Good luck!

Have answers prepared for “tell me about yourself” and why you want to go in-house. All of my interviews have skewed heavily towards behavioral/situational type questions, so think of specific examples to use (and be flexible/prepared to analogize—the questions I was asked didn’t always translate perfectly to someone with only biglaw experience, but you can make it work). Networking with in-house lawyers to understand what their day to day is like and how they add value to the business was also so helpful to understanding the larger context of how an in-house role differs from outside counsel roles!

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